In my previous post, I lamented the last ep in Season 3 of Longmire because it pretty much blew my sense of disbelief on a number of points. That being said, one of those points was further illuminated in Season 4, where in ep 3 we find out that Barlow had hired a soldier from Jacob Nighthorse to kill Walt’s wife for what turns out to be a logical reason — she was campaigning against the construction of Jacob’s casino, and Barlow was counting on it to bring in people for his nascent golf course and other businesses. To the producers’ credit this was brought up in one of the previous seasons. It still seems a bit of overkill to murder a woman dying of cancer, but at least I can follow Barlow’s reasoning now (although it would have been nice if this had been made a bit clearer in the S3 ep. A line from Barlow saying, “I had her killed to protect the family business that I’m giving to you, you little pissant” would have sufficed).

Still doesn’t excuse the other issues, but as a friend pointed out Absaroka County gets a surprising ton of dead bodies considering that it’s in a low-population state, so if you can buy that, you can buy iffy characterization choices and Walt and Henry getting away with stealing a dead body and having it accepted as evidence.

In other news, I’m closing in on the end of Intersection, as demonstrated by the already out of date target counter at right (word count is currently up to 62,058). With luck and a good tail wind, I should be typing “The End” sometime late tomorrow.

Which will be good, because it’ll give me the length of my upcoming vacation to let the backbrain cogitate on it and work out kinks, at which point I’ll be ready to edit it into shape when I get back. Release date is scheduled to be 2/7/17, and I’ll be making it available for pre-order as well as sending out ARCs to reviewers and bloggers. If you want to leave a review or do a blog post featuring the book, let me know and I’ll make sure you get one of the ARCs along with a media packet.